Age of Sigmar Game Day - The First Year

I have now been running the Age of Sigmar Game Day at my Fun-Local-Game-Store for an entire year!  It's been a journey of exploration, we've mostly played using variations on Warhammer World's Clash of Empires rules.

We've weathered a Chaos invasion of the fair Vale of Efengie, seen a few epic 8-player battles, and most recently campaigned into the Realm of Death.  Speaking of which, I've finished the 2nd volume of the Efengie Campaign book (Through the Deathgate).  It's just battleplans and pictures this time around, but it's yours if you want it.

I've tried several different approaches to it, and just want to run over what's worked and what hasn't for the benefit of you the readers, and to organize my own thoughts as I head into Year 2.

The Good

Clash of Empires - I'm really happy that Warhammer World came up with this style of Battleplan.  It's really helped stave off over-reliance on points as a balancing factor (in my local meta at least).  We'll probably do a 1000 point matched event at some point, but people mostly don't use points in my area, and I think that's at least partly due to the fact that we've been able to have organized events that don't use points.

The Community - Everyone in my area has been really positive about AoS.  We were pretty much all skeptical at first, but ever since things have gotten going, there's been a lot of enthusiasm (painted armies, at least passing interest in narrative gaming, etc.)

Multi-player - When we would have a buy at an event, we instead turn one battle into a 2v1 battle.  It's been fun, and has kept people from sitting around bored.  Multi-player is super easy to handle in AoS, and people being open to a bit of creative interpretation makes it even easier.  We've also had a couple of pretty fun oversized Triumph and Treachery battles.

Inkarnate - Since discovering Inkarnate, I've been able to make super-cool maps for my event packs and (by extension) campaign books.

The Bad

Clash of Empires - I have a love/hate relationship with this one.  I love its simplicity, but I'm always looking for little ways to improve it.  I've changed the summoning rules, and soon I'll be changing the army construction rules.  Aside from the obvious problem of it being a little repetitive after a while, some units end up strictly worse under its rules.  One example is Gors vs. Bestigors; they both have one wound, and Gors are never under any circumstances better than Bestigors, so the battleplan creates no incentive to field Gors.  I've been looking for ways to circumvent this, and I'll probably come up with some at some point, but tweaking the Clash of Empires rules has been one of my struggles.

Storytelling - I'm definitely still getting a handle on how to string together a story from a series of monthly events.  In the beginning I was good about writing fiction promptly following the events.  Lately, things have picked up at work, and I've gotten kinda' lax.  The story in Through the Deathgate ended up being a bit railroady, and I think in the future I'll stick to Eucebium and not go off on tangents.

Allegiance Abilities - This one isn't really Bad, just a challenge.  I started all this before the General's Handbook dropped.  After it was released and everything changed, I had to figure out how to allow for Allegiance Abilities without forcing them on everybody, and without bogging things down too much.  I've ended up finding a good place where you can take one set of Allegiance stuff (Battle Traits, one Artefact, Command Trait, Lore, etc.) at the cost of 1 Laurel of Victory.  I'm pretty happy with it, but I wasn't really prepared for it either.

The Conclusion

Things are changing.  GW is making little changes to AoS with each release, which helps keep things fresh, but also keeps me on my toes as an event organizer.  I look forward to learning more, changing more, and coming up with fun new ways to run Game Day (but sticking to the basics most of the time).